Toyota released a five minute video from Doga5 that brings together a real-life Doc Brown, the movie Doc Brown Christopher Lloyd, and Michael J. Fox. The Toyota scientist (a Back To The Future geek), introduces Lloyd and Fox to a Toyota hydrogen fuel car that runs fundamentally the same way the DeLorean does when Doc returns from October 21, 2015 (the date of the video release).

The video is a wonderful mix of Lloyd and Fox chatting about how much the movie predicts the future, the science of the Hydrogen car, and nice patter between the Toyota scientist and actors. All in all it just keeps on proving how valuable these long-form videos are for informing people about products that require consideration.

We posted recently about the growing volume of bot-generated posts in social in general and on Twitter in particular. Good piece on slate about this “artificial stupidity”. It’s relatively harmless to the average jane/joe but for businesses who are paying for social listening tools it’s a real problem as an increasing quantity of what they interpret as relevant volume is utter bullshit.

The vapidness of the results from social listening tools are a dirty little secret of the industry, the equivalent of the fake clicks that are a big part of online media, but eventually this issue puts at risk social listening as a research tool. Hopefully Twitter fixes things before it gets damaged beyond repair.

This isn’t Twitter’s only issue for use in analytics. The network increasingly feels like a PR Newswire source and less like a true environment for social exchanges. This combo of Bot-spam and Newswire-centricity has us depending less and less on the network for getting real insight into consumer point of view on a brand or a topic. I imagine us leaving Twitter out if it doesn’t get cleaned up soon.

A recent Adweek Infographic indicates the decline of consumer brand loyalty as represented by factors that include a decline in the interest of people in sharing information about a brand.

At the risk of leaning on causality instead of correlation I want to throw out this might in some small part be based on or at least not helped by the growing brand dependence on using curated content to connect with people. It was initially thrilling that companies found interesting ways to collect and distribute content with a tangential connection to their customers but, please stop (or at least slow down).

We want customers to have a strong relationship with our brands and yet we send them shite that is only lightly connected to our brand? If you look at brands that have used social and digital to create deeper connections you’ll find nary a curated piece among them. Red Bull, Zappos, IBM, and others like them depend on connection experiences that are based entirely on products, and more importantly at times, product experiences that give us deeper insight into their brands. Red Bull is an odd one since its brand is now of course more about a thrill-seeking lifestyle than a caffeinated beverage but regardless they nail it every time.

If there’s been a better marketer than Lego this year I’d be stunned. Hard to imagine anyone’s been better even for the last 10 years with a couple years where you could vote for Apple or Red Bull.

Between the brilliant product tie-ins, crazy amount of cool consumer content on YouTube, and now great movie with really rich extended content (without the overkill of Anchorman 2) it is a relentless march of great customer engagement.

Who knew that reviewing the responsibilities of a Grip could be so cool. 10 minutes of the insider workings of making movies as a Grip makes you want to PAY to see a movie one of these guys worked on.

By the transitive property if I were to do a long-form video about a designer, or tool and die person, that helped build a Tesla or the new Corvette and it sounded cool then I’d be more inclined to buy their product, correct?

Someday, hopefully soon, marketers will figure out the value of well-done long-form and use it to inspire customers and prospects.

We’ve been flapping our gums about the merits of long form video for a long time and lately enjoying what Chanel is doing with the history of Gabrielle Chanel.

We’ll say it again — why do we know more about the the origins of a few different spirits brands (like Johnnie Walker), fashion icons (like Chanel) than we do about any brand of car we can buy?

Seriously Chevy, if you made a new Malibu and it’s really different this time then for Christ’s sake, can you please wax poetic for a few minutes in some inspiring way on what went into this rev? Please?